Total situational awareness since 2004.

October 09, 2013

(UPDATE: Hello Dish readers and others who have been sent here from various corners of the internet. Welcome! This is Parabasis, a blog about culture and politics. I'm Isaac Butler, an erstwhile theater director and writer. I write most (but not all) of this site. You all might be particularly interested in The Fandom Issue, a special week-long series we did devoted to issues of fandom in popular culture.)

Every work of fictional narrative art takes place within its own world. That world may resemble our world. But it is never our world. It is always the world summoned into being in the gap between its creators and its audience.

Yet at the same time, the art we experience shapes our view of the world. As Oscar Wilde puts it in the Decay of Lying:

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy. It is a theory that has never been put forward before, but it is extremely fruitful, and throws an entirely new light upon the history of Art.

Wilde discusses this in terms of appreciating sunsets through the lens of Turner; perhaps our modern day equivalent is juries being incapable of understanding that real world evidence gathering isn't like CSI.

This odd tension-- that narrative art creates its own world yet helps shape our view of ours-- has given birth to (or at least popularity to) a new brand of criticism that measures a story against real life to point out all the ways that it is lacking. You've seen it before, right? "Five Things Parks & Rec gets right about small town budgeting bylaws." Now with Gravity busting box office records, we're getting astronauts and scientists telling us that there are many points where the film departs from real life. Entire critical careers are now founded on churning out "What X Gets Right/Wrong About Y" blog posts, posts that often completely ignore issues of aesthetics, construction, theme or effect to simply focus on whether in "real life" a given circumstance of a story would be possible.

In real life, people don't talk the way they do in movies or television or (especially) books. Real locations aren't styled, lit, or shot the way they are on screen. The basic conceits of point of view in literature actually make no sense and are in no way "realistic." Realism isn't verisimilitude. It's a set of stylistic conventions that evolve over time, are socially agreed upon, and are hotly contested. The presence of these conventions is not a sign of quality. Departure from them is not a sign of quality's absence.

The Realism Canard is the most depressing trend in criticism I have ever encountered. I would rather read thousands of posts of dismissive snark about my favorite books than read one more blog post about something that happened in a work of fiction wasn't realistic or factually accurate to our world as we know it. Dismissive snark, after all, just reflects badly on whomever wrote it (at best) and (at worst) cheapens the work it is written about. The Realism Canard gradually cheapens art itself over time. It's worse that the reduction of art to plot, or to "content." Those can still form the basis of interesting conversations. Instead, we're talking here not only about the complete misreading of what something is (fiction vs. nonfiction), but the holding of something to a standard it isn't trying to attain and often isn't interested in (absolute verisimilitude). We're talking about the reduction of truth to accuracy. We're talking about reducing the entire project of fiction so that we can, as Grover Norquist said of the Federal Government, get it to the size where it can be drowned in the bathtub.

And I suspect on some level this is part of the point of the The Realism Canard. That art in its size and complexity is too much to handle sometimes, and too troubling. That even though we say fiction's job is to take us out of ourselves, we don't really want to be pushed. So we must take it down a peg, to a point where it is beneath us and thus can be put in its place. And the easiest way to do this is to cross check it against "real life" and find it lacking.

Take this piece aboutBreaking Bad in The New Inquiry. It has some interesting points to make about the show's racial politics, but before it can get there it, it must shrink the show to manageable size by trying to come up with ways that its depiction of the drug trade isn't "realistic," landing on the show's overemphasis on the purity of Walter's meth. Set aside that the author's critique of the show's purity emphasis on realism grounds is wrong (purity matters because Walt is a wholesaler and the purer his product is the more that it can be stepped on by the people he sells it to), and set aside that the purity matters for character reasons (no one has ever been able to do what Walt figures out). The accuracy question with regard to Breaking Bad is a complete sideshow. Breaking Bad is not a work of realism. Its aesthetic and language is highly stylized, and its plotting is all clockwork determinism, as anyone who has watched the second season can attest. It's not trying to exist in our world. It's trying to exist in its world. You might as well criticize it for having a sky that's yellower than ours.

I don't mean to pick on that TNI piece, it just happened to be the latest one I'd read. At least it has something beyond factchecky questions to ask. Once you get through that bit, it's well written and eye opening to some racial dynamics I'm ashamed to admit I hadn't fully considered. But still. The Realism Canard is a problem, and it's everywhere (here's another one from Neil deGrasse Tyson about Gravity) and I feel it spreading more than ever over the internet's criticosphere.

Are there exceptions to this? Obviously. There are works where the idea that what you are watching is a fictional representation of things fairly close to our own world is part of the works' value, whether it be "based on a true story" films like Zero Dark Thirty and The Fifth Estate or social issue (and agit prop) works like Won't Back Down. And there are ways of discussing the differences between art and life that illuminate rather than reduce. That ask the question "what does it mean that they changed this thing about our world?" rather than assuming some kind of cheating or bad faith. Or ways that treat these differences not as a form of criticism, but rather a form of interesting trivia. Or, in the case of Mythbusters, edutainment.

There is also the issue of representational politics, particularly in light of what we know of narrative's deep intertwining with the processes of stereotype formation in the brain. But I do not think it's inconsistent to argue for diverse representations of the underrepresented-- and more characters that are fully rounded-- and the imaginative power of art.

What matters ultimately in a work of narrative is if the world and characters created feels true and complete enough for the work's purposes. It does not matter, for example, that the social and economic structure of The Hunger Games makes absolutely no sense. What matters is whether or not the world works towards the purposes of the novel rather than undermining them. People praise August Wilson's portrayal of poor and working class African American life in Pittsburgh, but many of his plays feature an off stage character who is over three hundred years old and has magic powers. One of them ends with a cat coming back from the dead.

The Wire's "realism" and "accuracy" are both shouted from the rooftops, but,for all of its deeply known and felt and researched world-building, it abandons both when it needs to. There is no way that Hamsterdam would exist in present day Baltimore. It's a thought experiment, an attempt to game out what drug legalization might be like. No one really cares, because it works within the confines of the show. Season 5's fake serial killer plotline is not actually any more preposterous than Hamsterdam. But it doesn't work largely because the shortened episode order left Simon et al without enough time to adequately set it up and the tonal shift in Season 5 to a more satirical, broadly-painted mode feels abrupt and off-putting. The problem, in other words, has nothing to do with whether it would really happen, or how journalism or policing really work. It's about the world the show has created and its integrity.

That, the integrity of the piece and of the world it creates, of its internal logics and rules, is what matters. My hope was always that as genre gestures got more integrated into mainstream literature and television and film, the overreliance on realism-based critiques would fade. Instead, it's intensified and is becoming a major mode of critical discourse. It's sad, really. There're so many more riches to be discovered in fiction if we could just let ourselves see them and not be so afraid that it might take us somewhere new.

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Ian,

While I definitely understand your point here, especially when it comes to more aesthetics and stylistic decisions (and, to be fair to Tyson, he's always had a tongue-in-cheek approach to criticizing science in pop culture), I don't know if you can utterly dismiss "realism" or "accuracy" concerns, especially when it tosses aside serious concerns related to socioeconomic issues and stereotypes. I get the sense you partly dismissed that with the New Inquiry piece.

If someone wrote "12 Things Avatar Gets Wrong about Native American culture," (just off the top of my head as a broad example) dismissing it can easily come off as justification to allow James Cameron and future filmmamkers to produce whatever-type of material in order to produce "art". In a way, that's fine; it's still problematic, and ought to be pointed out. Sure, many bloggers go overboard, but there's a legitimacy in pointing out the bull that various filmmakers gotten away, get away, and continue to get away with.

The question then becomes, per your example re: Parks and Recs, if P&R is simply exaggerating small town life for comic purposes or mishandling small town life stereotypes with no regards to how they really live for comic purposes (for the record, I believe P&R takes the former approach). Let's not get too caught up in allowing every creative to do whatever under the guise of artistic purposes.

Though of course, there are two categories of this kind of criticism. One is practiced by bad critics who can't enter into the imaginary fictional world. But the other is practiced by non-critics who, seeing that a certain thing related to the area of expertise is a hot topic, are trying to catch some attention themselves. I don't know how bad that is. If you know something about meth distribution or physics, and this is your chance to get your Slate essay before people move on to the next thing, I say go for it. Though it would be nice to admit within the essay that liberties with reality don't equal artistic or moral failure.

In that sense, I also get Tyson's frustration that people in space still thrills people's imagination, but there's not funding or the will to actually let people do it. Though the fact that Gravity is a tale of death and destruction may answer his "mystery" of why we prefer the fictional story over the reality.

Just a couple days ago, I listened to former President George H.W. Bush's 1988 nomination acceptance speech. In it, he had the following to say:

"Some say this isn't an election about ideology, it's an election about competence. Well, it's nice of them to want to play on our field. But this election isn't only about competence, for competence is a narrow ideal. Competence makes the trains run on time but doesn't know where they're going. Competence is the creed of the technocrat who makes sure the gears mesh but doesn't for a second understand the magic of the machine."

The "What X gets wrong about Y" critics are little more than creative technocrats, overseeing the meshing of gears without bothering to even consider the magic of the machine.

I can, however, appreciate being taken out of a film by a glaring deviation from our world as we know it. The trains do need to run on time, after all. But not knowing where they're going makes nitpicking a five minute delay not just petty and unhelpful, but an insult to criticism.

Kevin Johnson, with all due respect what are you talking about? I see that you're taking the 'Naavi = Indians' thing and using it to create an absurd phony blog post, but seriously what are you referring to when you talk about the 'bull that various filmmakers gotten away, get away, and continue to get away with'?

It's called suspension of disbelief. If you have a problem with it, you should avoid fiction. If you're nitpicking James Cameron, of all people, a filmmaker whose CV includes time travel, alien races, robots, super spies and ghosts, what kind of 'realism' are you really looking for?

Your reductive mode of thinking is exactly the problem that Isaac is talking about in this brilliant piece.

I totally see your point, but I don't find that these sorts of posts diminish from my enjoyment of the fiction in question at all. Granted, I'm only going to click on one about a topic that interests me, so I don't feel overwhelmed by them, but I loved Gravity and I also found Tyson's tweets very interesting and informative. (It helped that he made clear that he liked the movie and wasn't being a pill about it all.) I mean, I work in theater and I loved Smash. I don't need realism in my art. But I could see how for someone else, watching Smash could spark an interest in theater (or that's why they're watching in the first place) and they'd get curious about the reality. As long as that's the approach of "What X Gets Wrong About Y," and not "Can you *believe* these idiots?" I don't see a problem with it.

Just so we're clear, I watch and write about cartoons all the time. I love them - Archer, The Legend of Korra, TMNT. I love Demolition Man, Starship Troopers, and all sorts of ridiculous entertainment, so please, don't play that card. My post wasn't about the suspension of disbelief, and you know it.

The concern I was voicing was filmmakers using realism or creative license as an excuse to showcase their vision that also make mistakes that harm social/historical/economic perspectives. Sure, the Gravity nit-picking is useless. But fact-checking something like the The Help or Dances With Wolves, I would think, is more culturally important and somewhat necessary.

I think you maybe downplay the extent to which protestations of realism are central to a lot of art. They're absolutely central to Breaking Bad; it's supposed to be morally serious, and one of the ways that's put across is through viciousness and unpleasantness, which are markers of the real in that show and many others.

I agree with you in terms of fantastic entertainment; where the only real standard is well thought out or poorly thought out since it's inherently unrealistic. The problem is that so much of our experience of the world is filtered through media, so story truth comes to be believed as real truth. If the truth presented in a story is a lie, that can have consequences. Lies presented in media run the gamut from propaganda for the military in movies and TV to get access to military equipment and settings helping set the stage for wars, to CSI making it harder to get juries think forensic evidence is infallible, or propaganda like Birth of A Nation or The Outlaw Josey Wales, promoting the myth of southern victim-hood and the righteousness of violence in response to reconstruction. It's important that stories be scrutinized for accuracy because we need to be able to separate narrative truths from the way things actually work and are. I understand it's annoying for someone looking at a story qua story to have some horrible pedant point out that the sets are cardboard and the clothes are all wrong and by the way the person that character was based on was 4 at the time this was supposed to happen. But I prefer it to having my understanding of the real world be a pastiche of other people's lies.

Here's the thing: the problems scientists like Tyson have pointed out with Gravity are relevant to the story, because the story is about people struggling to survive in low-Earth orbit and find a way to return to Earth safely using today's technology (mostly).

Looking at it from another angle, the biggest factual inconsistency in Gravity is hardly mentioned by critics. The US Space Shuttle program has ended. We aren't going to be sending any shuttles into orbit in the future. Yet Gravity depicts a shuttle mission taking place at the same time a large, multi-module TianGong space station is in orbit. As of now, the Space Shuttle program is already finished and yet the Chinese have only placed one small module in orbit in preparation for its expansion into the full station in the coming years.

So there never was and never will be a moment in time when the skies above will contain both TianGong and a US Space Shuttle.

But nobody complains about that, because it's not relevant to the story. It's one of the things you have to accept as part of the fictional reality that the movie establishes with its audience. In the universe of Gravity, the US Space Shuttle program continues into the near future and coexists with the TianGong program. Ok, that's counter-factual, but who cares? We suspend our disbelief and accept it.

But some of us complain about the fact that it's impossible for Matt and Ryan to transition from a Hubble Telescope orbit to an ISS orbit. Why can't we accept that too? Well, because the movie is constantly telling us that the physics of free-fall are central to the story. The story, on one level, is about finding a way to survive given the harsh, unforgiving rules that apply beyond the loving embrace of Earth. The movie argues that it is illustrating that hostile environment accurately, and that an accurate understanding will ultimately edify us with a new appreciation of how grateful we should be that a place like Earth exists with rules that make sense for us and allow us to breathe freely and stand tall on solid ground.

So orbital dynamics are relevant to the story because an accurate depiction of the physics of space is relevant to the story. The history of the Shuttle Program is not.

Complaining about orbital dynamics when watching Star Wars would be silly, of course, but Gravity negotiates a different deal with its audience.